Friday Feeling
It’s Friday again, and what a glorious Friday it is! The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the mountains white with snow. Hopefully this weather will keep for the weekend as well. But, this being a weekday, we’re still all stuck in the office, working through our seemingly never ending lists of projects.
This week I’ve been playing around with our blog settings, switching to the iNove theme and changing the colours around a bit. I also thought it would be nice to have our mug shots as avatars next to our posts, but then Stephen had the good idea of using silhouettes instead. So, faced with the usual protests (”No! I can’t have my picture taken today!”) I’ve been taking profile snapshots of my colleagues and then photoshopping them into silhouettes. I think it turned out rather nice in the end. 
Nathan has been getting far too excited over Scott Hanselman’s essential .NET Developer Tools. If you’re a developer (.NET or not) this is a list of tools well worth looking at. It covers .NET, XML, Debugging, Launching, Viewing, Editing and pretty much anything else. It’s like a sack-load of Christmas presents for a developer.
Charles is busy evangelising why CRM is ‘too strategic to abandon in recession’. He found a research article by Gartner which highlights how customer relationship management is too strategically important for businesses to abandon in the recession. As the recession deepens, however, companies are looking to drive greater efficiency and lower the costs of their CRM projects. Gartner believes that CRM is seen by many businesses as an important tool in the worsening economic environment, as it minimises customer churn and the value of each customer. The survey found that the CRM projects concerned will primarily focus both on improving customer retention and increasing wallet share. Gartner found that while there had been a shift in thinking about new CRM initiatives, the news was far from bad. “The responses to this later survey [December] indicated that, as expected, some budgets for CRM initiatives were negatively impacted, but the latest survey results showed that their earlier budget allocations for CRM initiatives largely remained in place,” said Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner.
Stephen has reluctanly had to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from his machine for the time being. The latest release, although more compatible with existing web sites than the previous Beta 2 release, seems to be more unstable with frequent crashes and other issues. Hopefully the final release due this summer will have addressed this.
So there you have it. Another week gone. As usual it’s been both challenging and rewarding, making you look forward to a couple of days off but also feeling rather excited about what next week will bring. Have a good weekend, people!
